Very slow booting and running and braindead OS's 4539

Yes. Now you got it :-).

It was in our shop because of the way we had to have a system up and timesharing, no matter who had what system stand alone and firefights. Firefights were always #1 on the priority list.

Yes. Thus, if the boot medium cannot go away, what is getting written that makes this a restriction?

However, from reading this thread, I don't think this separation is SOP.

Morten's post posited that you could not move the file structure to another physical disk without rebooting the system. TOPS-10 could do this. There seems to be a lot of these timesharing tricks that hasn't been carried on into modern day OSes.

Given that ROOTA is on a physical disk FOO. My system has two devices that FOO can mounted on. My timesharing system is up and running and I want to physicall move FOO from the disk device that has smoke coming out of its vent to the other disk device that isn't smoking. Can I move the disk from Smokeydevice to Gooddevice without rebooting the system?

You should be able to tell the monitor (a.k.a kernal) to change its pointers from Smokeydevice to Gooddevice, move hte pack and continue timesharing while the fire brigade carts off the Smokeydevice for cooling R&R.

BAH